A multiplayer mode would be great, and difficulty on the coding part depends on the implementation ofc.

Here's maybe an achievable idea. What if a game with multiple players could be setup, each with the same map or a map with (somewhat) equal parameters. There could be a region, let's say a pool of patients who need to decide to which hospital to go to, to some degree. So let's say there's 100 patients/month in the beginning, and 70 of them decide on a hospital according to numbers like death rate, temperature, speed of processing etc. The parameters could vary per patient (or per group). This way, a player with a better run hospital would have a benefit in the numbers of patients incoming, and a worse hospital would have less patiens entering in.

In order for this to work, the same speed would be neccesary for each player to be able to compete on the same level.

Some more elements could higher the competitiveness. For example:

In-region chat

Buying epedemics / rats / other sabotage actions for another hospital

Benefit for being able to threat more diseases

Same pool of staff to choose from

Ability to alter speed at the cost of money

Coding wise, just a really small server that would regulate patients based on simple stats and some kind of chat implementation would be needed. This would be quite lag-independant, and would even allow for players to drop-in or drop-out.

Another idea: compete on campaigns. Set-up a Campaign with maps and goals, implement just a chat protocol and you could run a campaign for an extended period of time, and see who's the first to reach the end!

Some sort of lobby for matchmaking would be required as well. Perhaps someone can use some ideas from the different open-source lobby programs for the Spring games (open source remake of Total Annihilation) which can be found at http://springrts.com/

The only thing holding back lan mode is that no one has volunteered to code it (and followed through) yet. It will take substantial dedication from a volunteer to work LAN into CorsixTH. Because no one is currently working on it, there is no schedule for when it will happen.

I'm also looking forward to the day it does, maybe as much as o0Julia0o.

If no one is already working on this, then I want to have a go at designing and then implementing a LAN multiplayer system and mode for CorsixTH. I know there's at least one person who has said in the past that they would work on this but they've not been heard from for a long time.

If someone has already done some work for a LAN mode then I would like them to contact me so that I can make use of their hard work and have less work to do myself. I'm willing to work with other developers on this task.

I've created a new Github discussion for this enhancement where I will be posting comments about my progress when I start working on this soon.